


The Little Vampire

by doctorbuffypotterlock79



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: Blood, F/F, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Lesbian AU, Mild Injury, Vampire AU, b and v are just soft babies, mild bullying, the little vampire inspired
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-16 13:57:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21037337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorbuffypotterlock79/pseuds/doctorbuffypotterlock79
Summary: Vampire Vanessa meets human Brooke and their relationship develops over the years.Loosely inspired byThe Little Vampire





	The Little Vampire

**Author's Note:**

> So I’ve been in a vampire/Halloween mood lately, and came up with this idea. I did change a lot from the movie, so you don’t need to have seen it to read this. It’s a little weird, but it’s essentially a fluffy friends to lovers fic with some minor vampire details.
> 
> I would really appreciate any feedback you have!

Brooke’s new room is too dark. 

Despite the glow of her kitty-shaped lamp, the room is black as the midnight sky outside, shadows creeping along her walls. Brooke watches as they sway. Maybe they’re ghosts, or vampires, or witches, or--her mom told her they’re only shadows and the rest is her imagination. Even so, she’s sure someone is watching her.

She tugs the blanket up to her chin, holds her stuffed elephant against her chest, and closes her eyes. _Please let me fall asleep, please let me fall asleep_. She’s hardly slept at all the whole week since her family moved here, tossing and turning as the old house creaked and waking from nightmares where vampires flew by her window. 

Something rustles against the window. Her eyes snap open. A long shadow curves outside, growing so that it devours the pale moonlight, surely on its way to devour her. _It’s just my imagination. It’s just_\--the window rises with a squeak. Brooke’s heart starts pounding. A hand slides in and rests on her window pane, and Brooke squeezes her eyes shut as something thumps onto her floor. 

“Whoa! Who are you?” A rough voice asks. 

Brooke opens her eyes. Standing in her room, with her mouth wide open, is a girl. Brooke can just make out her all-black clothes and long brown hair in the lamplight. And are those--she squints--_bat wings_?

“Who are you?” The girl asks again, inching closer. 

Brooke retreats into the corner of her bed and pulls the sheets over her head. “It’s just my imagination,” she says out loud, hoping her words will make it true. 

“Did I scare you? Don’t be scared, it’s okay. I’m not your imagination, I promise.”

The girl hasn’t hurt her yet, and Brooke reasons that she probably would have done so already if she wanted to. She cautiously emerges from her blankets. The girl is smiling at her, and Brooke’s heart slows, warmth spreading deep in her stomach. She notices the wings are gone. Maybe she just imagined those too. But Brooke’s room is on the second floor; _how else could she have gotten here_? 

“Did you just move in?”

Brooke nods. 

“Oh. I come here to rest when I’m out at night sometimes. This house used to be empty. I’m Vanessa.”

“I-I’m Brooke.”

“How old are you?”

“Seven.”

“Me too!” Vanessa’s grin is wider than her face, and Brooke can’t help but smile too. 

“Are you...are you a vampire?” Brooke asks, something about Vanessa making her brave enough to ask. “My mom says they’re not real.”

“I’m real,” Vanessa says. “You can even touch me and see if you want.” She reaches her arm out to Brooke, slowly, like you would to a fearful animal whose affection you wanted to win. Brooke touches her fingers to Vanessa’s cool skin and feels a tingle go through her arm all the way to her toes. 

“You’re real,” Brooke confirms.

“I ain’t gonna kill you, if you’re worried about that. My family only drinks animal blood.”

Brooke nods. Maybe it’s her overactive imagination, or her young mind that hasn’t yet been dulled by adulthood, but Vanessa’s confession doesn’t startle her in the slightest. 

“Does your elephant have a name?” Vanessa asks suddenly, pointing to the stuffed animal Brooke’s had since she was a baby, fur smooth from providing comfort to her worried fingers over the years. 

“Peanut.”

“That’s cute. I have a stuffed wolf named Shadow.”

Brooke laughs, trying to keep it quiet so she doesn’t wake her parents downstairs. 

“I should probably go,” Vanessa says, glancing over at Brooke’s clock. “You got school tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah,” Brooks sighs, already dreading what would await her. 

“‘Kay, bye.” Vanessa waves as she heads toward the window. 

“Will you come back?” Brooke asks, hoping the answer is yes. Somehow she had talked to Vanessa this whole time without her stomach knotting in fear, and she can’t help but think how nice it would be to have a friend. 

“Yeah.” Vanessa grins. “I think I will.”

\---

Brooke gazes out her window hopefully every night after that, but it’s 13 days before Vanessa crawls into her room again. This time, Brooke sees her wings before she retracts them, midnight-black with thin scarlet webbing in between, and she knows it’s not her imagination.

“Hey,” Vanessa says, voice casual, and Brooke holds back her excitement at having a friend, returning the greeting with a small smile rather than the ear-to-ear grin she feels inside. 

“We could talk, right?” Vanessa asks. She sits in Brooke’s desk chair and Brooke knows she belongs there, like her room is a puzzle and Vanessa being there is the last piece to make the picture. 

“Yeah. My parents are downstairs, so I don’t think they’ll hear us.”

“Okay, coo-”

“What’s it like to be a vampire?” Brooke blurts, unable to hide her curiosity another second, face growing hot. “Sorry.”

Vanessa laughs softly, and Brooke has a feeling she’s holding back her real laugh to stay quiet. “You’re okay. It’s pretty cool. I don’t have to sleep much, just a little during the day, and I get to fly around at night, and my parents teach me on their own so I don’t have to go to school or anything.”

“Lucky,” Brooke mutters. 

“What’s it like to be human?” Vanessa inquires, bringing the chair closer to Brooke’s bed. 

Brooke shrugs. “It’s okay, I guess. We sleep at night. If we want to fly we have to take a plane. They’re really big and scary. I go to school during the day, which isn’t that fun, and if you’re a grown-up you go to work, and it makes my mom and dad grumpy a lot so I don’t think that’s much fun either.”

“But you get to do human stuff, though,” Vanessa insists. “You get to really live, and that’s what I really, really want more than anything. You get to go outside in the sun and play during the daytime and stuff. And the beach! I’ve always wanted to go to the beach and pick seashells.” Her face looks dreamy, like she’s thought about doing those things several times. 

“How come you sound excited about it?”

“Can I tell you a secret?” Vanessa whispers.

Brooke nods eagerly. She’s never had a friend to share a secret with and knows she’ll keep it with her forever. 

“Me and my family are gonna become human. My parents said there’s a rit--rich--this thing we do, but we have to wait till I’m older. Like, 16 or something.” 

“That’s like, forever from now,” Brooke whines, even a school day lasting for centuries when you’re seven. 

“I know,” Vanessa says. “But someday, we could go outside and play together! I won’t have to come in your window at night!”

“That would be nice,” Brooke breathes, reluctant to hope but hoping all the same.

“It would.” Vanessa smiles, then heads out when they realize it’s well past midnight.

That night, Brooke dreams of her and Vanessa playing together under a bright sun. 

\---

Brooke grows to leave her window unlocked at night, sometimes opening it a crack even in the winter and just piling on another blanket in the hopes that Vanessa would come see her. Vanessa couldn’t come that often because she didn’t want other vampires to know where Brooke lived and put her in danger, but she crawled through Brooke’s window a few times a month, and nights with her were enough to get Brooke through almost anything the third grade threw at her. 

“Where’d you get that from?” Vanessa points to the scrape on Brooke’s arm, which the nurse at school had rubbed with something that stung like a million needles. 

“School. Some kids were making fun of me and one of them pushed me. He told the teacher we were just playing. He didn’t even get in trouble for it.”

“That’s not fair!” Vanessa swings her arm around in anger. Brooke knows by now how fiery Vanessa can get and figures this is all she can do without yelling. 

Brooke shrugs, having long accepted the unfairness of school, an unfairness she figures will follow her afterwards too. 

“How come they make fun of you anyway? You’re so nice.”

“I’m really quiet in school. Sometimes...sometimes I get scared when I talk and I mess up,” Brooke explains, face flushing with the memory of that morning, when the teacher called on her and she knew the answer but it got all twisted up on the way out her mouth and the kids’ laughter rang in her ears. 

“They shouldn't make fun of you for that!” A little line forms between her eyebrows. “What if we got them back?” she asks. 

“How do you mean?”

Vanessa just winks.

Five minutes later Vanessa has her arms securely around Brooke as the cool night air bathes their faces and the moon twinkles above. Brooke holds the rolls of toilet paper Vanessa insisted they bring, and this high up, with Vanessa’s hands so close and making Brooke warm, everything that bothers her seems so small. She is free, her blue house with the doors the squeaked and the floors that creaked far behind, the school with mean kids and oral presentations just a speck. All that exists are her and Vanessa gliding through the air, Vanessa’s laugh, the _real_ one, not the quiet one reserved for Brooke’s room, rippling in the night and leaving an eternal smile on Brooke’s face. 

They swing around to Billy’s house, the meanest one, the one that had pushed Brooke that afternoon. They toss toilet paper over his house, hanging it from sparse, orange-leaved branches and laughing until they cried.

By the time Vanessa lowers Brooke into her bed, sharing a hug with only one heartbeat between them and pulling Brooke’s blankets up for her, she’s not even worried about school tomorrow.

\---

“The house smells really good,” Vanessa says one night. “You have something good for dinner?”

“Beef stew,” Brooke replies. Vanessa must have some sort of advanced sense of smell, because Brooke couldn’t smell anything. 

“Mmm,” she breathes longingly. “How ‘bout lunch? What do you bring to school?”

“My mom makes me peanut butter and jelly.” The sandwich had been in Brooke’s lunch box since she was five and ate in a crowded, noisy cafeteria, and is still a piece of comfort four years later as she takes her lunches in the open, quiet library. 

“That sounds _so good_!” Vanessa exclaims, eyes wide. “Do you think I could try one?”

“Sure,” Brooke answers. “I can’t do it tonight in case my parents wake up, but come back tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay!”

Brooke went through the next day counting down the seconds until it got dark, legs bouncing as dusk crept closer, guaranteed to see Vanessa. 

“You _can_ eat human food, right?” She checks, shoving Peanut under her pillow as she plops next to Vanessa. Brooke still liked having the elephant to hold in her arms while she slept, and though she doesn’t think Vanessa would make fun of her, she doesn’t want it on display.

“I mean, nothing _bad_ will happen if I eat it,” Vanessa answers, taking the sandwich into eager hands and chomping down. 

“Brooke, this is _amazing_!” Vanessa declares around a mouthful of creamy peanut butter and strawberry jam. Her eyes are shining so bright it distracts Brooke from her worry that her parents will hear, and her attention pulls to watching Vanessa instead of eating her own sandwich. The only thing better than seeing that joy on Vanessa’s face is knowing that she put it there. 

She gives Vanessa half of her own sandwich just to see it again.

\---

Brooke is awake, has been awake the past two nights, when Vanessa arrives. 

“Happy birthday!” Brooke exclaims as loudly as she dares. “I asked my mom to make cupcakes the other day, and I saved some for you.” 

“You saved cupcakes for me?” Vanessa’s mouth falls open.

“You only turn 11 once,” Brooke insists, offering her the plate, rainbow sprinkles bright against chocolate frosting. Vanessa’s eyes sparkle and she takes a giant bite, sighing in delight.

“And, um, I got you a present.” Brooke pushes the box over to her. 

“You didn’t have to get me anything.”

“It’s not anything exciting, it’s just…” she trails off as Vanessa opens it, running her hand over the seashells, softly clinking together. 

“Brooke, I love them,” she breathes.

“I know how much you want to go to the beach.”

Vanessa picks up a large spiral shell. “Let’s listen to the ocean together.”

Brooke leans her head in. Their cheeks touch, Vanessa’s cool as Brooke’s warms up. Vanessa has no heartbeat but Brooke’s is beating enough for both of them. The shell roars in their ears, and Brooke imagines the two of them going to the beach one day, listening to the ocean for real. 

\---

Brooke rolls over, searching for a position that soothes the ache in her legs from the growth spurt that started when she turned 13 last month, when the window rattles, a groan following. 

“Brooke, you gotta help me.” Vanessa hisses when she’s through the window, hand clutching her arm and face scrunched up in pain. 

“What happened?” Brooke jumps out of bed, heart twisting when she sees the blood spreading down Vanessa’s sleeve. 

“Some vampire that’s mad at my father attacked me.” 

Vanessa is so kind, so _human_, that sometimes Brooke forgets she lives in an entirely different world, one where vampires that weren’t kind like her family flew around and did terrible things. She wishes she could keep Vanessa in her room forever, protect her from anyone that would hurt her. She takes a breath, forcing down the panic at seeing Vanessa like this. “Hang on, okay? I’ll get some stuff in the bathroom.”

Brooke tries not to make a sound as she rifles through the bathroom, drawers flying open as she thinks of what to get. She’s never had much worse than scrapes and bruises, and there was a lot of blood… she gathers the supplies in her arms, dodging the creaky spots on the floor as she hurries back to her room, Vanessa wincing with pain in Brooke’s desk chair. 

“Okay.” Brooke tries to sound like she knows what she’s doing. Vanessa’s arm is soaked in blood and she cringes. Blood had always made Brooke squeamish. She quickly wrapped a Band-Aid around her finger anytime she got a papercut to hide the blood and had cried when they took a blood sample at the doctor’s when she was four, but she had to be brave. She couldn’t let anything happen to Vanessa. “Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried,” Vanessa insists. “I think you are, though.” She grins and winks even as the bloodstain grows. 

“I just don’t want you to be hurt.”

“I’m gonna be fine, Brooke. I have you, don’t I?”

The kind smile that accompanies the words give Brooke a rush of courage, and she tells Vanessa to take her shirt off, figuring that jumping in her stomach as Vanessa exposes her smooth skin is just concern. 

For all the blood, there’s only two slashing cuts on her arm, and Brooke feels she can handle this. Maybe if she just thinks of them as two giant paper cuts, she can do it. She presses paper towels against her arm, whispering a _sorry_ when Vanessa winces. She manages to avoid staring at the blood but can’t avoid how calmly Vanessa looks at her, how trusting those eyes are, like she would rather have Brooke’s hands on her than anyone’s. 

Brooke dabs on antiseptic--the cream one, not the one that stings, thank you very much; Brooke doesn't Vanessa to hurt anymore than she is. She winds gauze around her arm and secures it with tape, feeling like she’s secured her own heart now that she knows Vanessa is okay. 

“Thank you,” Vanessa says, hand wrapping around Brooke’s. 

Brooke nods. “D-do you want to stay here tonight?” she asks, this night bringing out every ounce of bravery tucked away inside her. 

“I probably shouldn’t.” Vanessa’s voice is apologetic as she pulls her shirt back on. “I don’t my want my parents to worry, and you might get in trouble…”

“Right.” Brooke agrees despite the hollowness in her chest, not pushing it further because she’s all out of bravery. 

“I really wish I could though,” Vanessa says before she leaves, and the room rings with her sincerity and regret until sunrise. 

\---

A teardrop splashes onto the math equation in her textbook. Her fingers are shaking so much she has to put her pencil down. It’s almost 1am and she should be asleep but she needs every second to study, even though she’s been working for over 3 hours and feels no less worried, shoulders tightening by the minute. The trigonometry test tomorrow is 20 percent of her grade, and if she doesn’t get this--

“Brooke, what’s wrong?”

Vanessa kneels beside her desk chair. Her eyes are worried and it only makes Brooke cry more to know how much Vanessa cares about her. 

“It’s stupid,” she mumbles, face flushing at the thought of Vanessa seeing her this upset over a math test. 

“I don’t care how stupid it is, if it’s making you cry like this I want to know, so I can help,” Vanessa insists softly, wiping one of Brooke’s tears with her thumb. “Tell me, please.”

“It’s-it’s my math class,” she manages. “I have a test tomorrow and if I can’t get this I’ll fail it, and then I’ll probably fail the class, and then--”

“Hey, hey, slow down. Just breathe a second.”

Brooke takes a deep breath, air flooding her lungs. Vanessa isn’t laughing at her, telling her not to worry so much, like her mother did, or scolding her, telling her to study harder, like her father did. She has that adorable wrinkle between her eyebrows that means she’s thinking, and Brooke’s body loosens just knowing she’s here. 

“Okay.” Vanessa rubs her hands together and Brooke knows she has a plan. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. You pick out some problems you’re worried about and do ‘em, and I’ll look up the answers and you go over it if you don’t understand. But only for a little bit, ‘cause you need to sleep, Miss Thing. You look like you sleep less than I do.”

Brooke smiles. “Okay.”

Brooke renews her focus and picks out 10 problems, scribbling into her notebook as Vanessa reads answers and rants about how trigonometry is the most useless thing she’s ever heard of in her life. 

The worry that had taken residence in her chest gets lighter as her eyelids grow heavier. She doesn’t remember falling asleep, but when her alarm wakes her hours later, she is tucked into bed with the blankets pulled up to her chin, Peanut wedged under her arm, and the textbook placed neatly on her desk. 

She swears her skin tingles with the ghost of a kiss on her forehead, but it’s probably just her imagination. 

\---

“Wasn’t there some dance at your school tonight? I saw a bunch of kids leaving it on my way here,” Vanessa says as she slips inside and sits on Brooke’s bed. 

“Yeah, the junior prom,” Brooke explains, putting her book down. “I didn’t go.”

“Why not?”

“No one I wanted to go with.” What she doesn’t say, what she can’t say, is that the only person she could have possibly braved something like that for is in front of her right now.

Vanessa stands up and holds her hand out, and Brooke is hit with a memory of the first time she did that, to prove that she was real. Brooke isn’t sure what she’s going to prove now. 

“Will you dance with me?” Vanessa asks. 

“Of course.” Even though her stomach is churning about what might unfold, she can’t deny how badly she wants to. 

She rests her hands on Vanessa’s waist and Vanessa’s hands stroke her back as they sway around Brooke’s bedroom, past the bookshelves and dance ribbons and academic medals and tickets from midnight movies she and Vanessa went to, a room that has been most like home when Vanessa is in it with her. 

“Brooke, I need to tell you something.”

“What is it?”

Vanessa takes a breath. Whatever it is, it’s scaring her, and Brooke holds onto her a little tighter. “The ritual to become human is next month, on the solstice, and I need to get ready for it, so I won’t see you before then. And the thing is, sometimes it goes wrong. If that happens, I might not remember you. So I...I wanted to come here tonight and tell you that I love you. I have for a while now, and I want to tell you while I can.”

_Vanessa loves her too_. But the joy rushing through her is derailed by worry. _It might go wrong_. For a minute, Brooke almost sinks into desperation and begs Vanessa not to do it, to stay a vampire as long as she’ll remember her. But Vanessa has wanted to become human since Brooke met her almost 10 years ago, and Brooke can’t ask her to put that dream aside. 

“I love you too,” Brooke says finally. “And I’ve wanted to do this for such a long time.” She bends down and lets her lips meet Vanessa’s, and it’s something she’s dreamed about so often it’s hard to believe it’s really happening. Just like when she flew with Vanessa, the rest of the world fades and it is just them, Vanessa’s smaller body nestling against her. 

Vanessa pulls away too quickly, but even at eternity would have been too quick for Brooke. “I have to go, okay? I promise I’ll do my best to remember you.”

She’s gone, out the window before Brooke even drops her hands, still holding on to Vanessa in her dreams. 

Brooke crawls into bed and cries, hoping Vanessa won’t be taken from her.

\---

Days go by outside her window, trees bright and green with summer, but Brooke feels a cold, dark winter in her bones. The solstice comes and goes, and it’s the middle of July when Brooke slams her window shut, not wanting to hear children laughing outside, the way she dreamed her and Vanessa would one day. 

She’s tidying up her already neat desk one night when something pings against her window. 

Hoping against hope, she pulls back the curtain and throws the window open. Vanessa stands in her backyard, rocks in hand. 

“Hey, Brooke,” she calls up. “You gotta let me in the front door, I can’t fly anymore!”

Brooke sprints down the stairs, not even thinking of waking her parents. _She can’t fly anymore. She can’t fly anymore, which means…_

Vanessa is on her doorstep, flashing a brilliant grin and throwing herself into Brooke’s arms. Vanessa’s heart is dancing against Brooke’s chest for the first time. “It worked!” she yells. “And I felt really weird at first, but then I saw those seashells you gave me, and I remembered everything! I love you so much, Brooke.”

“I love you too.”

They tumble into bed together, and Brooke falls asleep to the sound of Vanessa’s heart beating.


End file.
